Four short links: 21 May 2009

Us Now — UK documentary, available streaming or on DVD, about how open government and digital democracy makes sense. It’s good to watch if you’ve not thought about how government could be positively changed by technology, but I don’t think it’s radical enough in the future it describes.

Jetpack — Mozilla Labs’ new extension system. Mozilla Labs is building quite the assemblage of interesting hack tools, and it’s interesting how significantly they’re aimed at the developer and encouraging lots of add-ons and after-market extensions for the browser. I wonder whether this is a deliberate strategy (“community will beat off Chrome!”) or whether it’s a simple consequence of the fact that Mozilla is a developer organisation.